Three Powerful Food Lenses
Buckle up buttercup, this is a big one.
The unvarnished truth is that you’re probably making some pretty dumb decisions with what you eat. Now don’t take that too hard, what I mean is that you’re eating things that have an impact on how you look, feel and age that simply aren’t worth what they cost you.
There’s no morality in food. There are no good or evil foods. There is only biochemistry and thermodynamics. There are effects of food, both positive and negative. If a food brings you momentary joy, or is part of a family dinner experience, or maybe has cultural significance, clearly there’s a benefit there. But is it worth the gut inflammation, body fat, or chronic disease it will cause? That’s a decision only you can make. We can teach you how to stop guessing and get exactly what you want out of your food.
Lets introduce a few lenses through which you can assess the food you eat to better understand the costs of the dietary decisions you’re making.
Food quality
The food quality lens is all about ingredients. What is it that you’re eating and does it cause inflammation? Gut inflammation can manifest in many forms from bloating and indigestion to full blown autoimmune conditions like Hashimoto’s, rheumatoid arthritis, IBS, and Crohn's. Cleaning up your food quality is by far the biggest lever each of us has when it comes to feeling better. The good news is changes can be achieved in a very short period of time. We address this in week 1 of the Holistic Transformation Program, where most participants lose 5-10lbs as they flush out inflammation.
Meats, fruits, cooked vegetables, and healthy fats are generally well tolerated by the vast majority of humans. These are anti-inflammatory foods in the sense that they don’t damage your gut and are digested easily. A diet of only beef, berries, spinach, salmon, and olive oil (as one example) would leave almost everyone with higher energy levels, less bloating and GI issues, and dramatically improved inflammatory state. It might even clear up your dermatological issues, improve your sleep, and eliminate that bloated belly straining your t-shirts.
Foods like wheat, palm oil, and alcohol are heavily inflammatory for close to 100% of people that consume them. These foods can cause short term weight gain by inflaming the gut and causing fluid retention in the abdomen, and in extreme cases, extremities as well. Short term this can lead to feeling uncomfortably full, acid reflux, and brain fog. Left unchecked gut inflammation leads to joint pain, allergies, and wide ranging food sensitivities as well as a huge uptick in chronic disease risk.
Have you ever stepped on the scale to see you’re up a couple pounds from the day before? You’re inflamed. Rapid changes in body weight are indicative of inflammatory state, not a change in body composition which changes much more slowly.
Lastly, there are gray area foods like dairy and corn that have a high degree of variation in affect from person to person. For some they can be heavily inflammatory while others tolerate them well in moderate to high quantities. If you want to figure out which foods are causing you problems, running an elimination diet is by far the best way to find out. Check out the details of how to here.
If you want to improve your nutrition and fitness, food quality is the most effective place to start.
Macronutrients
The macronutrient lens looks at what forms of energy are in the food you’re eating. The primary macros are protein, carbohydrate, and fat. You can find these on a nutrition label of packaged foods, or a quick internet search for real foods like meat, fruits, and veggies.
Protein gets a lot of press and rightly so. Protein is by far the most important macronutrient for most of us. Proteins are broken down into amino acids by our body to fuel almost all our daily organ functions. The ones we need and can’t make are called essential amino acids and are found in all types of animal meat and fish.
Any amino acids left over after running your daily bodily stuff is used to support and repair lean muscle mass. Interestingly protein is not a primary fuel source for the human body meaning that if you consume more than you need it’s typically just eliminated and not stored as body fat. Protein is also the most satiating macronutrient keeping you full longer per calorie than fat or carbs. It would be hard in practice to cause yourself a problem by eating too much protein.
The next macro is dietary fat. Dietary fat often suffers from the confusion of sharing a similar name with body fat, although the two are less directly linked than you might think. Dietary fat is a slow burning fuel source that doesn't carry the same risks of overconsumption as carbohydrates because it does not cause an insulin response. Fats are critical for hormone production, brain function, nutrient absorption, and even health of your hair and nails. For most of us, a large proportion of daily energy intake should come from fats, primarily monounsaturated and saturated fats. Olive, coconut, avocado, and animal sources make up most of our intake. Dietary fats aren’t quite as satiating as protein, but they’ll keep you full longer than carbs per calorie.
For a confusing time over the preceding several decades there was a widespread hypothesis that dietary fat causes heart disease, particularly saturated fats. This hypothesis has been shown to be widely baseless and predicated on some poorly executed science further skewed by powerful profit incentives.
Carbohydrates are the last macronutrient we’ll cover. Carbohydrates aren’t inherently evil, but overconsumption can quickly cause problems. When you consume carbs they enter the bloodstream as blood sugar. As your blood sugar rises the storage hormone insulin is released to store this energy. The sugar in your bloodstream, often along with the triglycerides as well, can go one of several places including being stored in your muscles, liver, or fat cells, with the latter having the most storage capacity by far.
This process is absolutely critical to our ability to store energy for periods when we will have to go a period of time without eating. That being said, overconsumption of carbs leads to the accumulation of body fat, insulin resistance, and fuels chronic diseases such as cardiac disease, cancer, dementia, and diabetes. While carbs can be valuable for fueling and recovering from high intensity exercise, there is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. You could live your whole life with a high level of fitness and health without any significant carbohydrate consumption. It’s also worth mentioning that carbohydrates are the worst macronutrient when it comes to satiety. Think about a time when you’ve eaten a whole bag of candy or a loaf of bread at a restaurant. If you’re hungry, carbs are the last place you should look to satisfy your hunger.
More on if carbs are actually evil…
Calories
The last lens we’ll introduce today is calories. Stepping into the physics world for a moment, thermodynamics and conservation of energy tells us that if there’s more energy entering a system than being expended the energy remains in the system. In a human body our primary way of storing energy is as body fat.
While weight loss and weight gain shouldn’t be oversimplified to just calories in vs. calories out, that energy balance is absolutely part of the driving equation. Protein and carbs each contain 4 calories per gram, while dietary fat contains 9 calories per gram. Add up all the macros of your food and you’ll arrive at your total energy intake.
Generally speaking, if you’re eating far more calories than you’re burning you’ll gain weight as that energy is stored in your body. Conversely, if you burn far more than you consume you’ll have to make up the deficit by burning tissues from your body for fuel. Which tissues your body burns is largely dependent upon how you’re exercising, sleeping, and your hormonal profile.
If you’re putting on body fat, one of the factors at play is a caloric surplus. Conversely, we use very specific targeted calorie deficits in the Holistic Transformation Program to effectively and predictably cause rapid and sustainable fat loss.
Putting it all together.
If we use just these three food lenses to look at what we’re eating, it tells us we’d be better off eating primarily anti-inflammatory whole foods that are rich in protein, healthy fats, with a little bit of carbs and doing so at an intake level that fuels activity but doesn’t allow for the accumulation of body fat.
If that sounds enticing but the details are a little vague, we can help. We’ve built a program that takes all the guesswork out of how to implement your new found knowledge around foods.
The first step is a free consultation where we can learn about you and see if you might be a good fit to work with us. Click the link below and get something on the books! We can’t wait to chat.